1. Technical Field
The present disclosure pertains to a method and apparatus for operating an internal combustion engine using a fuel consisting of water and a water-soluble flammable substance that is injected into a mixture of hydrogen and air.
2. Description of the Related Art
The use of fossil fuels for engines that are used, for example, in cars and other vehicles, as well as many other engines used for a variety of purposes, is based on a very old concept based on the internal combustion engines developed in the nineteenth century. Despite intense research and development for alternate fuels for the last 50 years, fossil fuel derived from petroleum or natural gas, is still essentially the primary source of energy almost all the internal combustion engines presently in use all over the world.
As a result, the world supply of fossil fuels have been severely depleted creating a shortage, and the price of oil has been climbing for the past 40 years. In addition such fuels are very polluting and some suggest that it has either been the primary cause or has contributed substantially to global warming. All these factors led to many efforts to find and harness renewable energy sources other than traditional fossil fuels. Several alternative fuels have been introduced in the past few years to reduce the impact of petroleum depletion, including hybrid cars, electric cars, bio diesel, hydrogen based cars, etc. However, none of these solutions were effective. One reason for this lack of success is that they require a completely new infrastructure for the production of the engines, as well as the production and distribution of the fuel. Moreover, most solutions proposed so far have been incompatible with the existing engines. The cost of replacing all the existing fossil burning engines may be so high that it may render any solution based on alternate fuels unacceptable, at least in a short term basis.
Water as a source of fuel has been suggested by many in the past and numerous experiments have been conducted testing such systems. The basis of such experiments is the fact that water can be separated in to hydrogen and oxygen and the resulting stoichiometric mixture can be fed to an internal combustion engine to generate power. However past experiments yielded unsatisfactory results. The main obstacle to their success is based on the fact that the energy required to separate the water into its components is much greater than the energy produce by the engine. In addition the amount of H2 mixture needed to run a typical automotive engine is too large to make such a system practical.
Systems are presently available on market that can be used as accessories or add-ons to internal combustion engines using fossil fuels, however independent tests have shown that, in fact, these systems have very little, if any, effect on the overall efficiency of the engine.
A system developed by the present inventors is described in two co-pending applications includes means of generating from water and supplying a small amount of hydrogen/oxygen gas mixture into a standard internal combustion engine. (See U.S. Patent Application Publications 2010/0122902 and 2011/0203917). More specifically, these co-pending applications describe an efficient process and apparatus for generating a two-to-one mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, commonly referred to as brown gas or HHO. The mixture helps increase the efficiency of the conventional internal combustion engine by burning the fossil fuel more efficiently. While this latter system is much more efficient than previously described systems, its efficiency is still limited by the amount of hydrogen and oxygen produced on board a vehicle. Moreover, the internal combustion engine described is still burning a fossil fuel.